Processing devices and environments are regularly subjected to failures. As a result, enterprises deploy a variety of backup and restore features. In fact, many operating systems (OSs), such as Windows®, provide users with the ability for backups and restores from prior backups.
Backups may be performed in an automated fashion by users as well; however, typically restores are manually initiated after a user selects a desired backup image to restore from or after a user manually determines something is working incorrectly with the user's current version of an OS for his/her device.
Self-Service Terminals (SSTs) and especially Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) present unique challenges for conventional backup and restore operations.
Firstly, an ATM is a highly secure environment with very restrictive access network access and, typically, a service engineer has to manually be present to perform and needed backups or restores. This is time consuming and inefficient.
Secondly, because an ATM is a secure environment; the ATM transactions are restricted; maintenance access is done on at the ATM; customers of the ATM have a limited interface with circumscribed input mechanisms; and the software of the ATM is heavily quality tested, any fault conditions or any resource failures are not as frequent as they occur on other devices and systems. Thus, backups and restores are infrequent. But, this infrequency should not imply that ATMs require no backup and restore capabilities because fault situations can and do occur.
Thirdly, OSs rarely require updates or upgrades in an ATM environment. More frequency, a specific application or resource receives an update or upgrade and most backup services are for an entire OS not for a specific resource. The same is true for restores, where a typical restore will wipe out an entire existing OS environment and replace images of all resources; rather than replace a single resource within an existing OS environment. Furthermore, sometimes in an ATM environment it is not even a resource that is an issue but, rather, a configuration of that resource. Backing up and restoring configurations for an existing resource in an existing OS is not addressed in the industry.
Lastly, what an owner or service engineer of an ATM considers to be a condition on the ATM, which warrants a restore to a prior working image for that ATM, is generally not a true fault condition. For example, a particular application may not fail but may produce incorrect data or diagnostics indicating that something somewhere is wrong but pinpointing the issue can be time consuming and the time spent locating the issue the ATM is offline and not available for customer business.
So, the traditional backup and restore technology are not geared to or focused on the unique challenges associated with SST (and in particular ATM) operations.